Shelby
Steele, who was a black radical in the 1960s, has since acquired a view of both
blacks and whites that is almost completely unclouded by dogma. Dr. Steele,
who has been a fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1994, is perhaps the first
mainstream author to analyze white built and describe the tremendous damage
it does ...

Dr.
Steele begins by musing on what the William Clinton- Monica Lewinsky scandal
told us about how moral standards change. He writes that he recalls reading
that president Eisenhower used to use the word nigger when he was
on the golf course. That posed no threat to his presidency, just as Mr. Clintons
debauching an intern posed no threat to his. However, suggests Dr. Steele, had
each man done what the other did, they would have been hounded out of office.
Race simply replaced sex as the primary focus of Americas moral
seriousness, Dr. Steele writes ...

The
central insight of White Guilt is that racism is now Americas
most despised crime. Dr. Steele is silent on how this came to be, but he is
right to see it as the fundamental psychological transformation of our time.
This transformation meant that far from being able to face other races with
confidence and even a sense of superiority, the idea of evil had begun
to attach to America and to whites. Anyone who could be accused of racism
immediately lost authority, and not just on social questions. Racists
lost all standing as respectable human beings. As Dr. Steele points out, the
rigid new structure of taboos thus makes the moral authority of whites
and legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that
they are not racist.

One
of Dr. Steeles keenest observations, and the one that has earned him the
most liberal wrath, is that the rituals by which whites avoid the taint of racism
- protestations of love for blacks, denunciations of bigotry - have
little to do with wanting to help blacks and everything to do with demonstrating
innocence. As he explains: Surely genuine goodwill may also be a part
in such efforts. But the larger reality is that white guilt leaves no room for
moral choice; it does not depend on the goodwill or genuine decency of people.
It depends on their fear of stigmatization, their fear of being called racist.

Whites
submit to just about any humiliation if that is what it takes to demonstrate
that they are untainted - what Dr. Steele calls disassociation from racism
at any cost - and he emphasizes the classic liberal mistake of trying
to pass off mere dissociation from racism as selfless virtue and real human
empathy. Liberals preen themselves on their compassion, but, as Dr. Steele
writes, in the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly
racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show
themselves innocent of racism. Blind to h is real motives the liberal
genuinely believes he is a better man than the world has seen before.

One
of the best recognized ways to demonstrate guiltlessness is to practice racial
preferences, to join the scramble to lure indifferently qualified blacks onto
college campuses. And what is enough minorities? asks Dr. Steele.
Enough is just enough to clearly dissociate the institution from Americas
old racist patterns. Without preferences it would be utterly impossible to admit
enough minorities for a convincing dissociation. Dissociation requires evidence
of a proactive effort, a self-conscious and highly visible display of minority
recruitment.

White
absorption goes further. As Dr. Steele points out, since it would be racist
to say blacks have any responsibility for their failings, white liberals ride
forth to smite racism, promising uplift that does not require blacks to move
a muscle. Dr. Steele puts it this way: If a young black boy cannot dribble
well when he comes out to play basketball, no one will cast his problem as an
injustice ... But if the boys problem is reading or writing ... (c)areer-hungry
academics will appear in his little world, and they will argue that his weaknesses
reflect the circuitous workings of racism ... The boy will not be asked to truly
work harder.

Low
black test scores cannot be due to laziness, stupidity, or brutish parents.
Instead, whites lather black students with Afro-centric math, black history,
Negro role models, and multi-culti voodoo of every kind. Blacks can never save
themselves, so the very structure of the liberal faith - that whites and
society must facilitate black uplift - locks white liberals into
an unexamined white supremacy. Dr. Steele notes that all this anti-racist
posing gives liberals a moral glow, but their inability to treat blacks like
real men with control over their lives makes it impossible for them to accomplish
anything.

Merit,
excellence and ability, writes Dr. Steele, are unfortunately exclusionary.
Inclusion requires that excellence be ignored, that mediocre Third-Worlders
be treated like great artists, that black tinkerers be hailed as geniuses, and
that every obscure Negro be put on a postage stamp. This racial climate creates
a demand for snake-oil salesmen, black and white, who claim to confer authority
on whites by teaching them how to genuflect...

It
did not take blacks long to discover the fun to be had in the brave new world
of white guilt. By the mid-sixties, writes Dr. Steele, white
guilt was eliciting an entirely new kind of black leadership ... bargainers,
bluffers, haranguers ... who could set up a trade with white guilt. The
militant Shelby Steele of 30 and 40 years ago  began to understand that
my country was now repentant before me, and that this brought a new power
over whites.

This
power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the
basis of past victimization became the new black power.
Dr. Steele writes that the older generation of civil rights leaders believed
their behavior had to be impeccable, that they had to act better than white
people if their call for equal treatment was to be taken seriously. Things changed
in the 1960s: (B)lack power would no longer come from being better than
whites; it would come from not being better ... (I had) the feeling that being
black released me from the usual obligation to common decency and decorum ...
I was licensed to live in a spirit of disregard for my own country.

Even
whites in positions of authority were cowed by black swagger. As Dr. Steele
explains, black power grew in direct proportion to white built, and would not
have been possible without it. Many people have noted that the black riots of
the 1960s came after the passage of the major civil rights laws,
not before, and it is likely that those concessions to black grievances encouraged
the very violence they were supposed to prevent.

As
Dr. Steel explains in this passage: Anger is acted out by the oppressed
only when real weakness is perceived in the oppressor. So anger is never automatic
or even inevitable for the oppressed; it is chosen when weakness in the oppressor
means it will be effective in winning freedom or justice or spoils of some kind.
Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice.
And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with less injustice.

The
last three decades of the 20th century were therefore the golden age of the
racial shakedown. The whole point of black militancy was to make whites responsible
for black progress. Instead of feeling shamed by their failures of their own
people, blacks could parade them as an accusation. And, of course, any hint
of racism was - and still is - a trophy to be cherished, to be waved
in the face of abashed whites as often as possible.

The
most profitable pose a black could strike was therefore that of victim, and
when victimization is identity, then the victims passionate anger
can be called out even when there is no actual victimization. As Michael
Levin has pointed out, the angrier blacks go, the more they were able to convince
whites there was something to be angry about, and the more likely whites were
to do as they were told.

The
old left had been trying to make race an irrelevance; the new left discovered
the tremendous advantages in being as black as possible. Dazzled by the rewards,
not many realized that the victim pose came with a price. (I)it quickly
became the most totalitarian and repressive identity that black America has
ever known. All dissent became heresy, punishable by excommunication ...

At
the same time, if you were black and thus a victim of racial oppression,
this new morality of social justice meant you could not be expected to carry
the same responsibilities as others. This, writes Dr. Steele, was the
worst possible trick to play on blacks. Just when unprecedented opportunities
were open to them white liberals and black hustlers told them success would
never come until whites transformed themselves and their society...

Dr.
Steele recognizes that hardly anyone in America has the slightest desire to
oppress blacks, and that it is nearly impossible to point to anyone with any
power who is a racist. That is what gives rise to the now
common argument that racism is systemic, structural,
and institutional, or global, as he calls it. When no
people can be found who are racist, then institutional racism has
to be invented to explain black failure. Dr. Steele puts it neatly: impersonal
and structural forces ... worked by the invisible hand
to stifle black aspiration even when real racists were nowhere to be seen.

This
fiction solved an important problem: For black leaders in the age of white
guilt the problem was how to seize all they could get from white guilt without
having to show actual events of racism. Global racism was the answer.
As Dr. Steele explains, global racism enables blacks to frame racism to
the scale of white guilt rather than to the scale of white racism - to weak
these days to count for much.

Dr.
Steele writes about pampered black college students: Global racism allows
these students to feel aggrieved by racism even as they live on campuses notorious
for almost totalitarian regimes of political correctness - and to feel more
aggrieved than black students did forty years ago, before the civil rights victories.
This is because their feeling of racial aggrievement is calibrated to the degree
of white guilt on university campuses and not to actual racism.

He
continues: Global racism prevails precisely where whites and institutions
must aggressively search for moral authority around race. Even announcements
of a new commitment to diversity within an institution will very
likely increase feelings of racial aggrievement in minorities. We blacks always
experience white guilt as an incentive, almost a command, to somehow exhibit
racial woundedness and animus. 

To the Edge of the Precipice, a
review by Thomas Jackson of a new book by Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How
Black and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,
Harper Collins, 2006. American Renaissance, May 2007, p. 8-10